We went to a thirty fifth wedding anniversary celebration. It was a surprise party for the bride and groom.
I was the only natural blond in the room of sixty or so celebrants. Besides my wife and myself the other non-blacks were a few hispanics. From the moment we walked into the conference room we were bombarded with soul and jazz. I haven’t heard that much soul and jazz played that loud for that long, well, since forty years ago in the hooches of Nam.
It was a nice trip black. I hadn’t been there in along time. My world is very small I guess. There’s my work and my family and it’s usually enough.
Wow, that made memories come back. I left the service from my enlisted time in the mid 70’s. I worked my way through undergrad and medical school with some friends I had made in the service. I worked in West Philadelphia and nearly all my friends/coworkers were black. I had to learn to go to parties by CP time. The music was really important and there was a lot of good jazz, seldom any pop.
I never really did learn to dance but i could play basketball all day long. Work, go shoot some hoops, go home and shower then meet at someone’s house to have a brew and listen to whatever was up that night. Good times.
Steve
I was in the wrong place, back of a duece and a half, at the wrong time, driver rolled it over on top of fourteen of us, and got to spend some quality time in a hospital in Japan.
I am a lot of what I am today as a direct result of those experiences.
A man was killed in that accident. I had been in the outfit less than two days. When everyone was at the hospital later I was told he was killed, broken neck, died instantly. He was described as that tall black guy. I vaguely recall a big black guy when we got onto the truck.
I never knew his name. I just knew one man had been killed. Five maybe six or seven years ago I found a website that searched the Wall. If you knew the province and the date you could search the names of those killed that day in that province.
I looked up the province and entered August 11, 1968. One man was killed that day in that province. He was African American. He was twenty two years old. His MOS was 36C, signal corps lineman, and he died as the result of vehicle accident.
His name was John Calvin Miles. His home of record was Burlington North Carolina. Eventually my courage matched my curiosity and I looked up all the Miles in Burlington North Carolina. I think there was something like seventy listings.
I figured out real quick that one of the two zip codes listed had white sounding voices. The other had black sounding voices. I concentrated on the black sounding one. My spiel was pretty simple. I was looking for the family of John Calvin Miles and it was about Viet Nam.
A woman’s voice explained that she knew his mother and offered her number. I asked if she had the number of a sibling to John Calvin because I really didn’t want to cold call the mother. It was explained that his brothers didn’t have phones and if I wanted to talk to family then mom was it.
It was a day or so later before I had the whatevers to work up to the call. It ended up being the conversation of a lifetime.
I believe the highlight for me was her asking about Viet Nam as a place and a people. It seemed John Calvin had told her that when the War was over he wanted to take her there because the country was so beautiful and so were the people. I confirmed his opinion. That’s how I saw it.
The lowlight was her explaining that just before he was killed he had mentioned some racial stuff going on and it making him nervous. So the family had assumed all these years that the story of the accident was a coverup for some racial crap that had caused his death.
I explained he did die instantly of a broken neck. He was just too tall for the space he occupied when the truck landed on it’s top. We laughed and cried until a male voice grabbed the phone and gave me heck for bringing up stuff that should be left alone.
I think the thing that bothers me the most about John Calvn’s death was his family evidently lived in a separate America from the one I did. In theirs a man could die and the government would cover it up and that would be all there was to it.
The other thing is I’ve had conversations with others who were in the outfit at that time but wasn’t in the accident. The one thing they’ve expressed disbelief about my story is that there was racial stuff going on at that time. I have to attribute this to even in groups that coexist in probably the most intimate of a non-family existance there can be two separate perspectives when it comes to race relations. That’s worrisome.
Wow. My heart goes out to you. Being a guy I don’t know what else to say. My military story is nowhere near as profound but I can share some on the race relations.
I was a corpsman. I volunteered since military duty was the norm in the family. In boot camp our company had about 70 people. 30 black guys from the south side of Chicago, 30 white guys in a group from Cleveland (redneckish guys seemed to me) and ten of us from all over. Our CPO was a drunk. Gone most of the time and a sadistic bastard when he was there. About 10% of our drill sessions ended with someone calling someone a racial name and then they would fight, often swinging those old m-1’s at each other. The blacks and the whites in our barracks (big H shaped bldg about 3 stories high with one company per each leg of the H per story) had rigged signals in case things went bad. There was a stabbing in our shower and the call went out. We had angry blacks at one end of our barracks shouting at angry whites at the other.
John Brown (real name), our recruit chief stood in the middle of all these guys with his puny recruit sword and dared anyone to try to get past him. Then the shore patrol arrived. Lot of guys got kicked out and some locked up. A big meningitis round hit starting 2 days later that killed 4 I think and things calmed down. I rarely tell people this story since no one believes stuff like this happened.
I had orders to go with the Marines but they were changed for some reason and never went to Nam. I think I was lucky. As a corpsman I was named an honor corpsman. That meant I got to take care of the POW’s that came back. Those guys were messed up I will never forget that.
As a physician in the military I got sent to Saudi for Desert Storm. We had some racial tensions there. I took aside 2 junior black officers and told them I wasn’t going to let things fall apart if I could help it. I bought a TV out of my own money and my wife sent tapes and food and stuff. We built a theatre with stuff we “borrowed”. We organized black night films to help keep things calm. We organized training sessions and parties. We had to work pretty hard at it but we kept the lid on.
The event that lives with me from there was having one of my techs die. Romano was a quiet kid who played cards and basketball with us. He was engaged to marry Natasha when we got back. Natasha (we called her Tasha), had no family and Romano asked me if I would give her away since I was the only officer he knew well enough to ask. A couple hours after our nightly card game some of the young guys came running for me. They found Romano not breathing in his sleeping bag. He had combined some drugs a pharmacy tech gave him with a drug they stole from Anesthesia. A fatal combo. When I got to him his EKG was flatline already. I knew I had to code him to try. I knew it was useless. I had to call Tasha. I still wake up with that one sometimes. Romano was Hispanic, Tash was black, I am white.
I visited the Wall for the first time this year. If you get the chance go.
Steve
“I think the thing that bothers me the most about John Calvn’s death was his family evidently lived in a separate America from the one I did. In theirs a man could die and the government would cover it up and that would be all there was to it.”
Sorry, I think we all live in that America today. At least, over the last 30 years, I’ve run into 4 or 5 cases of mysterious deaths in the armed forces, 2 hispanic, 2 black, and one white. In one of them, the army actually sent back the wrong body. Cover-up? It’s hard to say. But certainly inadequately explained. I hate these cases, because there’s not much a lawyer can do, except work with congressional people to try to get more info. And the results are still pretty unsatisfactory.